Tears
by xSakuraBlossom
Summary: "More and more, we found ourselves unable to hold a civil conversation. It would always inevitably lead to a verbal fight, and I would be the one sliced to ribbons." Study of Sakura and Touya's relationship, based on RL experiences. Rated T for language.
1. Chapter 1

Disclaimer: I don't own Cardcaptor Sakura. All I own are the experiences, which are slightly skewed on the page.  
A/N: written from Sakura's point of view, about her brother Touya.

Why do we cry? Why do humans sob when faced with pain, anger, joy? Why does everything seem to lead to someone shedding tears? What makes the saline droplets a natural response to everything?

I hate the tears. I hate the way they stream out of my eyes when I least want them to. I hate how they make me seem so weak, when really I'm not as weak as I seem. I hate how I always cry in front of the people I least want to see my weakness. I hate it.

Others think me and my brother just tease each other a lot. I present a happy, cheerful persona at school. They think we're just playing up the old sibling rivalry. Nobody seems to know just how much he hates me.

Before, it really was just teasing. When we were young and innocent. But somehow, over the years, it changed. Something strange happened, and all of a sudden insults, real insults, were flying back and forth through the air, sparking at every contact between us. When had we become so dysfunctional?

And every time, I would come away crying. I would say something, trying to be friendly, and he would snap at me. He would call me unsavory names and tell me I was stupid, or a bitch, or a fucking idiot. And I would be wounded, and ask if he could stop with the names.

He never would. "Why should I listen to you, bitch? You're nothing but a stupid monster."

And I would withdraw, knowing that there was no way I could ever reason with him.

We grew further and further apart as time passed. More and more, we found ourselves unable to hold a civil conversation. It would always inevitably lead to a verbal fight, and I would be the one sliced to ribbons.

Mainly, it was because I didn't like to retaliate. Just because he was mean, didn't mean I had to respond in kind. I tried my best to block his pointed shots, but there were so many. They were so pointed. Not all of them were deflected by the shield I had erected around my heart.

The barbs just seemed to accumulate over time, rankling anew in my chest as he carelessly tosses a new insult at me. "Tampon Bitch" was a new one, one that I hadn't heard before. I acted nonchalant, but I was so scared of what it meant, that I didn't even bother to go look up its true meaning. I was scared of yet another testimony of just how much my brother hated me.

When I went on a diet, my brother helped in his own way. By calling me fat every time I ate something. By saying how overweight I was. By calling me by a new insult now during our arguments- "Fat bitch". Unsurprisingly, I really did lose weight.

With each fight, each verbal spar, the shield around my heart seemed to grow weaker. More and more insults found their mark, and I became more and more easily wounded. It took so little to make me cry now. So little.

So it was almost understandable when I snapped one day. It was an almost normal argument. I had noticed the rather large gash in our almost-new sofa the day before, but hadn't mentioned it to my father because I thought he would notice it himself. The next day, my brother noticed it, and when I said I had seen it the day before, he started yelling at me. Why hadn't I told Dad? Stupid bitch.

I told him that I didn't think I needed to. I meant that I thought Dad would notice, but of course my brother didn't take it that way. He started yelling again. "You didn't think he had to know? What the hell? Do you even see how big this gash is? Fucking idiot!"

I almost flinched back from his words, but bravely I stood before his unrelenting onslaught. "Look, if you think it's so important, why don't you just call him now? Tell him."

"I will, actually, you stupid bitch. Don't you see just how big this is? God." He went to the phone immediately.

Pretending nonchalance, I went back to what I had been doing before the argument began- looking for my summer reading book. As the conversation started, I found myself listening to the one side that I could hear.

"Yeah, Dad? There's a huge gash in the couch. The small one. I just noticed it today, but Sakura says she noticed it yesterday, but she couldn't be bothered to tell you."

"Don't skew the facts," I stated quietly. He looked at me, almost triumphantly.

"I'm not." I just stared at him. After a short while, he said into the phone, "Oh, sorry, I couldn't hear you over Sakura's yapping."

The cold words, so matter-of-factly stated, cut me to the quick. Before, our fights had been just between the two of us. Never had anyone else been pulled in. Nobody that had believed it was a fight, anyways. But now, he was even biasing our own father against me. When had it come to this?

"… Yeah, it's a really big gash. On the small sofa. Yeah, I didn't notice it yesterday either. Only Sakura did, but like I said, she couldn't be bothered to tell you."

Anger rather than sorrow was rising within me. I often did that- hid my sorrow behind a façade of rage. It seemed to work. Nobody ever seemed to really know how much their words hurt me- they would just see my anger.

"Do you mind?" My precise, barely-controlled words were brushed off by my brother.

"Sorry, do you mind repeating that? Sakura's talking again."

I wanted to scream. I wanted to rant. But I knew that what I said would be heard through the phone, and I would be in essence skewing my father against myself. It hurt.

"Yeah, ok. All right. Ok. Bye." He hung up, shooting me another triumphant glance. I felt like I was frozen in place, unable to move.

As he walked by me again, I said, "Touya. Touya, listen to me." He seemed to ignore me, but I continued to talk. "This fight is between us, ok? It always has been. So don't try to bias Dad on your side. This fight is only between us, don't pull others into it."

He looked right at me, a sign that he really had been listening. "So?" was his answer. "Anything to bring you down."

My heart gave a huge wrench at that. Why had it come to this? Why?

I snapped. My sorrow came pouring out, disguised behind a wave of anger.

"You fucking _bastard_." The last word was almost screamed out, ringing through the near-empty house. "If this is how you get your kicks, you are one sick kid." He smirked at me.

That self-confident smirk made me flare up even more. "You know what? This is why you don't have any friends."

"Stop trying to lie. You're not very good at it." He replied calmly.

"It's not lying! Do you even know what kinds of things your friends tell me behind your back?" I was lying, but trying to keep him from knowing. For once, I really, _really_ wanted to hurt him.

"Why do you think I would believe you? Stupid lying bitch."

I turned tail and ran. But I made it seem like a tactful retreat… or not so tactful, considering I was still screaming like a madwoman. "You know what? Go ahead. Don't believe me. You'll just be sorry when you find out in a couple of years that I was right. When all your friends leave you."

I could hear his laughter even in the next room. "Right. You just keep saying that. I don't listen to bitches."

"One day, your friends will find out how sick you are inside. And then they'll really leave you. And don't say I didn't warn you when it happens." I continued my way away from the war zone.

But somewhere on the stairs, I found myself stopping. The tears were streaming down my face again. When had they started? When I was more or less begging him not to lie about me to other people? Or when I had started saying he had no friends?

I started to speak again, not caring if he was listening or not. "… Touya?" There was no answer. "You know, I never actually hated you. Anything I said or did, was always in retaliation to what you started first. I never really meant any of it." And that was as close to a sincere apology as I was ever going to get to this bastard.

"I really never hated you. So knowing that you actually hate me really, really hurts." The tears were like a river now, flowing unchecked from my eyes. "I never wanted to fight. But whenever I try to be nice, you snap at me. And we start fighting."

"All I ever wanted was to stop fighting. Because I hate it. I hate fighting with you. I want to stop fighting. I want us to be friends. But no matter what I do, I can't make it happen. Every time I try, you continue to snap at me. And I hate it."

I really wish we wouldn't fight any more. Because I really don't hate you." I stopped here, my throat choked up by the tears.

I heard footsteps. Hoping against hope, I saw Touya enter the room below me, looking up at me at my position on the stairs. "Screw it. You know what, I feel so damn sorry for you that I'm actually going to listen to you for once."

He stood there like he was waiting for a response. I managed to force my throat open and speak. "Thank you," came my hoarse words, before I started up the stairs, tears streaming even more. He had accepted this tentative truce. Perhaps we still had a chance.

And as I walked, he had one last parting jab. "So, you had nothing to say huh?" and I heard his footsteps going away.

He thought I had wanted something. He thought I was acting, trying to get sympathy. He thought that I was only pretending this, so that he would finally do something I wanted.

He hadn't accepted the truce at all. Because he hadn't seen it as such in the first place.

I was at the top of the stairs at this point. I cried out, "There was nothing to say! All I wanted was for us to stop fighting! I just didn't want us to fight any more…" Not trusting myself to speak anymore, I fled into my room, where I just sat and let the tears fall.

The salty taste of tears flooded my mouth whenever I licked my lips. When I moved, I could feel the drying tracks of tears trying to hold my skin in place. And I could feel even more tears streaming out of my eyes and passing over the dried tracks of tears that had gone before them.

My brother and I will never find a real peace. We will never come to a real compromise, a real laying down of the arms. We will never know what it's like to have a sibling bond stronger than any friendship, stronger than any love.

My tears are the only thing between us. The verbal insults, the shouting matches, are the only contact we have. The twisted bonds of blood are almost nonexistent. I think he would rather that we weren't related, that he didn't have to see my face every day.

Why do we cry? Why do the drops flow down my face, staining my old jeans a darker blue colour? Why do the tears leave my eyes red and puffy, my cheeks blotchy and unsightly?

The physical presence of tears is unexplained to me. But somehow, crying comforts me. The tears seem like they wash away the sorrow, wash away the pain. And when my eyes dry up, and the tears on my face evaporate, leaving salty tracks behind… it's like the pain leaves with it, leaving only a memory, a memory that quickly begins to fade so that I don't even remember the words we yelled at each other, only what we argued about, and the reason behind our argument.

It's only been half an hour since our fight, and the tears have dried up. Already, I have forgotten the words, the painful spears.

But I know that when we fight again, every one will come back to haunt me, stab me all over again. And cause more tears to flow, in a neverending vicious cycle.

*** endless ***


	2. Chapter 2

Disclaimer: I don't own Cardcaptor Sakura. These events are also slightly skewed on paper.  
A/N: Still from Sakura's POV. The aftermath of the fight.

I suppose I owe an apology to my brother. After all, I made myself out to be completely blameless in the last incident. When really, I'm not. I'm not blameless at all.

Now that I've calmed down a bit, I can see that I really was wrong in not telling Dad about the sofa right away. I really don't know what I was thinking at the time. Maybe I wasn't. But that is definitely a mistake that I shouldn't have made.

For another, if I hadn't blown up at Touya and challenged him to call Dad, he wouldn't have done so while being mad at me. In such a state, it was almost justifiable that he would say bad things about me while on the phone.

And then, even if he was yelling stuff at me, I had no reason to say he had no friends. I know he has friends. And that's a low blow. That's not fair fighting. Like I said, our fight was between us. I shouldn't have pulled his friends into it.

And besides, I was being a hypocrite. I told him not to skew the facts to other people, when in fact I tend to skew facts myself. Although not really deliberately. Like, to my father, I'll make myself out to be better than I am. Or I'll play the poor, beleaguered sister to all my friends, who commiserate with me about cruel and mean siblings. Or I'll tell the world, through a fanfiction post, that I was completely free of blame, that Touya's the monster.

So, really, that last post should be taken with a grain of salt. Because if everyone were to believe that… then really, Touya's not the monster any more. I am, for making him seem like one to the whole world. And I never really meant for that to happen.

Because I really don't hate him. I just wanted to get my feelings out. And because I was so upset at the time, my thoughts on paper turned out just as skewed. But really, Touya's not as bad as I made him out to be.

For instance, there was that time when we went to English class together. They put me into a lower grade than I was supposed to be. When I complained to him, he didn't brush me off like an irritating fly. Rather, he sided with me, and showed me his own textbook. When I could read most of it, he said I was definitely in too low of a class, and suggested a class for me. And he also told Dad about the predicament, and Dad in turn told the teacher, who arranged for a testing, helping to place me in a grade level more appropriate for me.

For another, I was wondering about what electives to take in high school. I'd ended up going to the same one as he had. I had to take a Science, and was hovering between the 3 options- Biology, Chemistry, and Physics. He told me Biology was the one most people took for an easy Science, since there was a lot of memorization but not much comprehension involved. I told him I had a terrible memory. Rather than laughing at me, he referred me instead to Chemistry, saying how it was a blend of comprehension and math, and had a nicer teacher than Physics (in that the Physics tests were always hell). With his help, I even managed to ace my first Chem test.

And there are always all those times we went behind Dad's back to sneak some snack food into the house. Chips, popcorn, ice cream, fries… we often went out and bought some snacks, and hurriedly finished them off before Dad returned. The thrill of conspiracy only seemed to make the forbidden foods taste even better. And we never fought during those times.

Really, we don't fight quite as much as I said before. It's just that when we _do_ fight, the fights seem to be terrible. But maybe that's just because I'm too emotional.

So, after that long spiel… all I really want to say is… Sorry, Touya. Sorry for everything I do to you as well, not just in retaliation for what you do to me. Sorry for being a hypocrite and telling my own friends stories about you. Sorry for making you out to be worse than you are. You're really not that bad of a brother. And you _are _my brother, after all. And I love you.

So… friends?

*** Owari ***


End file.
